Potato is the largest non-cereal food crop worldwide and ranked as the world’s fourth most important food crop after rice, wheat, and maize.  Potato is a vital food-security crop and substitute for cereal crop considering its high yield and great nutritive value.  Therefore, by replacing wheat, rice or maize in traditional staple foods partly by potato, the nutritional value of traditional foods and the utilization of potato are expected to be improved.  China is the largest potato producer worldwide in terms of either volume or area.  However, majority of potatoes are consumed as fresh vegetables for cuisine, and the industrial processing rate is much lower than the global average.  Thus, research and development for nutritional potato stable food suitable for the dietary habits of Chinese residents are of great significance.  However, we still confronted plenty of constraints in the development of potato staple food.  In order to develop potato staple food suitable for Chinese residents’ dietary habit like noodles, Mantou (steamed bread), rice and rice noodles, also to industrialize production of potato staple foods, some transformations need to be realized.  Independent innovation is the only choice to realize the potato staple food processing and industrial development strategy on the technical level.  Thus a lot of researches have been done to promote the development of potato staple food in China.  Up to now, we already developed a series kinds of potato staple foods and some of these staple foods have already been widely promoted in Chinese markets.  

A endochitinase gene (Tch) from the fungus Trichoderma viride was introduced into broccoli (Brassica oleracea var. italica) by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. Sixty-eight putative transformants were obtained and the presence of the Tch gene was confirmed by both PCR and Southern blot analysis. RT-PCR analysis showed an accumulation of the transcript encoding the endochitinase protein in the transgenic plants. Using real-time quantitative PCR, the expression profiling of endochitinase gene was analyzed. Primary transformants and selfed progeny were examined for expression of the endochitinase using a fluorometric assay and for their resistance to the pathogenic fungi Botrytis cinerea and Rhizoctonia solani. The endochitinase activities in T0 in vitro plants, T0 mature plants and T1 mature plants were correlated with leaf lesions, and the transgenic line T618 had high endochitinse activities of 102.68, 114.53 and 120.27 nmol L–1 MU min–1 mg–1 protein in the three kinds of plants, respectively. The endochitinase activity showed a positive correlation with the resistance to the pathogens. Most transgenic T0 broccoli had increased resistance to the pathogens of B. cinerea and R. solani in leaf assays and this resistance was confirmed to be inheritable. These findings suggested that expression of the Tch gene from T. viride could enhance resistance to pathogenic fungi in Brassica species.